Game design on one piece of paper

Can you fit your game idea onto one 8.5x11 piece of paper? I think you should be able to show a good idea of the game with many of its core concepts, from the story to gameplay mechanics to concept art and even some mockups. A stranger should be able to understand your vision of the game by only looking at this piece of paper. Is your game idea strong enough for that? Does it have enough solid ideas and a unified, focused theme? Does it have enough content to go beyond a simple one or two-level demo? If it doesn't meet all of these points, then would it be wise to start coding the game until you do?

When you get down to it, making a game takes a lot of time. Brainstorming ideas of paper takes virtually no time in comparison. It's fun to jump in and start coding something, but having a good idea of what you want to see at the end will save you countless amounts of hours from redesigns of code, graphics, levels, and sound.

The rule of thumb is that the more time you spend designing your game, and the more complete that design is, the more smooth the game development process will go. You realize problems with your design early on; and when you catch them in the design phase, all you need to do is cross them out, so to speak. It doesn't take a massive overhaul of the code, depending on how complex the problem is to fix.

Something I run into when designing is that I realize how incomplete my game is. It challenges me to think about content and ideas to keep the game interesting through to the end. Sometimes I realize that I don't like my idea or the direction I'm taking with the game, so I stop there, and it only took a couple hours of my time as opposed to hundreds of hours developing the game to the point where I realize the same problem.

It does take practice. If you're used to jumping in with both feet and coding your way along, learning to think about the game in the design process can be frustrating. You don't "see" your game in action, but only what's on the paper. However, every problem you encounter along the design process you'd encounter in the implementation (coding) process anyway. Designing your game beforehand allows you to tackle all these problems head-on and sort them out beforehand so you have a less frustrating (and more fun) time implementing your game, and a much better chance of following through to the end and releasing a quality game.